


i went to jail and all i got was this lousy 25 xp

by piketrickfoot



Series: a tiny town by the sea. [1]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Character Study, Dungeons and Dragons, Gen, character backstory, sibling relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 09:44:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13831563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piketrickfoot/pseuds/piketrickfoot
Summary: When Asta Lenore was born, for just a moment the stars stood still.Or, the past escapades of an up-and-coming warlock, who is so unprepared for what lies ahead.





	i went to jail and all i got was this lousy 25 xp

**Author's Note:**

> this is just me self indulgently rambling about my d&d character - don't mind me \\( ﾟヮﾟ)/

When Asta Lenore was born, for just a moment the stars stood still. Her brothers took to her easily, tweaking her then-nubbly horns and holding her hands as she took her first wobbling steps. Their mother and father were fishermen, with but a small boat and a travelling stall to their name, so occasionally during Asta’s childhood she and her brothers would pile into the cart and hawk their parents’ wares throughout the surrounding towns and cities. Those trips occupied a large portion of her memories of the time when her parents were alive - sixteen-year-old Kas driving the cart while she, nine at the time, and twelve-year-old Aetri steadied the crates in the back. It wasn’t easy work - the sun was hot where they set up the shop, and Asta’s young eyes would sag until she could no longer keep herself awake, and somehow she would find herself slumbering in her brother’s arms in the back of the cart as they made their way home. 

Her parents were away most of the time from her sixth birthday onward, as Kas, thirteen, was finally deemed old enough to care for herself and Aetri. The three of them spent the hours poring over the dusty old books in her mother’s study, playing games of make-believe, and, more often than not, getting into trouble with their neighbors. Asta and Aetri got into the habit of planning grand, sweeping heists, gambits unlike any ever performed - Asta, with her nimble frame and ability to slip around unseen, would often climb up and over the fence into their neighbor’s garden, stuffing her shirt full of berries and roots before signalling Kas to hoist her back over the fence, heart in her mouth. The three would eat until they were sick, and then fall asleep on the rug before the hearth. 

Sometimes, before it was light out, Asta would awaken and steal off into the early morning down the road to the bakery. It was owned by a kindly old woman by the name of Nancy, who was fond of the Lenore children and would slip her a trio of pastries - croissants, sometimes, or great big muffins dotted with chocolate chips like stars. When Asta got home, Kas would scold her halfheartedly, and then the three would sit around their old, rickety wooden table, drinking juice from wood cups with residual teeth marks (the proof of a household which once saw three teething tiefling children) and laughing quietly into the morning air. There was almost always a fire roaring, and the children would wait eagerly for their parents’ return.

Yana and Wilhelm Lenore were loving parents, tough but fair, apologetic for the necessity of their distance, and though they were at sea more often than with their three children it was clear that they loved the three of them dearly. Asta and Kas never doubted this, were never made bitter for their absence or in need of reassurance that they were loved. Aetri, however, as the years went on grew more withdrawn. Every time they left for the high seas Aetri was convinced they would never return. It became harder and harder for Kas and Asta to coax their brother out of his room, to involve him in their jokes and play-time, to keep him safe and happy. Kas in particular worried for his brother, and would spend long hours trying to convince him to eat, to drink, to spend an hour here and there in the sunshine. Asta, too young to understand her brother’s depression, his self doubt and distress over their parents’ dangerous occupation, could do nothing but curl up by his side when he was bad, and help him make the most of it when he felt a bit better. Slowly but surely, Asta and Kas managed to convince their middlest brother that everything would be okay, that their parents would always return. 

And they did, until one day, the eve of the greatest storm in the history of Wister Bay’s fishing community, as the winds raged and the clouds darkened the sky to blackest gray, the boat of Wilhelm and Yana Lenore was dragged under, below the surface to whatever monstrous entity lay below. 

The three siblings handled the loss in different ways. At nineteen, fiercely proud and independent, Kas threw himself into what had been until then just a hobby - the creation and sale of magical artifacts. He spent long hours scouring books and procuring the materials necessary, took up the kitchen table with his gadgets. Asta’s wonderment at the creations of her brother never really went away. He would take her with him as he travelled from city to city selling the artifacts. In this way, he kept the three of them going. 

Asta, then twelve years old, became obsessed with the sea. She would beg sailors to take her on their fishing-trips, grew well acquainted with the regulars down at the docks, the ship-cats who prowled the alleys, obsessed with the idea that her parents were still alive, still out there, and she could still find them if only she tried hard enough. Aetri forbade her to venture out onto the waves, but she paid him no mind - only concealed the true source of the occasional few copper or piece of silver she was paid for her troubles as a deckhand. 

Aetri took their deaths the hardest. His dour mood became positively gloomy. He never smiled, never laughed or joined Asta’s heists anymore at all, refused to accompany Asta and Kas when they went to sell the latter’s artifacts. Aetri would come home bloodied, with black eyes or broken noses or once, memory, lacking a finger, and Kas would sigh and Asta would fret and Aetri would curse the both of them and leave once again, off to pick pockets or intimidate strangers for whatever gang he’d sworn himself to this week. More and more often he spent nights away from their childhood home, and Asta, more and more often, was abandoning her trips to the docks in favor of searching the seedier parts of town for signs of her brother’s presence. 

Kas’ business was taking off. Eventually, five years after their parents’ deaths, Kas decided to turn their old room into a workshop. It was, he reasoned, what they would have wanted - it would have been important to them that their children survive after their passing. Kas moved their belongings into the basement, and his workbench and tools from their common area into his parents’ old room, and he ignored Asta’s protests, and that was that. 

It all came to a head the next week, when Aetri slipped back in through their parents’ window to find a nearly bare room, his brother’s work supplies tucked into one corner and his mother and father’s personal effects nowhere to be seen. The resulting fight was explosive, unlike anything Asta had seen between the two of them until then. Of course there had been fights, of course Aetri had stormed out angry before, but it had never been so personal. It had never before seemed like her brothers hated each other, like they never wanted to see each other again. 

“I’m leaving, Kas,” Aetri had spat, pushing past the taller brother into his room. “I’m going and I am never coming back.” 

Kas had scoffed. “You said that last time, ‘Tri. I know you. You’ll be back in a couple weeks, once you’ve had time to lick your wounds. We’re your family. You have to understand this was for the best.”

“Fuck you,” Aetri had said, slipping out into the night. 

Those were the last words Kas or Asta had heard from their brother since. Asta had tried writing to him, but she didn’t know where to address the letters. Despite the fact that there was no animosity between she and Aetri, her brother had not contacted her, had not even paused to say goodbye to her. At seventeen, she didn’t know how to handle the knowledge that while he probably didn’t _loathe_ her the way he seemed to loathe Kas, he simply didn’t care about her one way or another. She gave her letters to someone she knew he had been in contact with back in his old gang, and prayed they reached him, but he never wrote her back. 

A few weeks later, a travelling market of oddities and trinkets had come to town. Asta had been perusing the wares, flitting back and forth among the stalls, in awe of all the ancient jewelry, the goblets and chalices and long-forgotten tablets, but she hadn’t the money to purchase any of it, so she became content to admire from afar. Eventually she reached the end of the faire, where a lone, closed-curtain tent sat, bright purple in color and beckoning to her. 

She pushed aside the curtain. “Excuse me?” she said in wonder, looking around. The walls of the tent were piled high with ancient books and scrolls, each musty and contributing to the smell of the room. At the table in the center sat a young elven woman, possibly in her early thirties, with a dazzling smile and mischievous eyes. 

“Come in, young one. I do not bite,” the woman had purred, inviting Asta closer. 

The array of books were dazzling, but Asta had not the funds. She contented herself to look, scanning her eyes down the pages, trying to savour all the information she could. As she replaced one book - something called the Tome of the Forgotten Lovers - another dropped from the shelf to her feet. She picked it up quickly, looking around, embarrassed, to see if the woman had noticed. The elven woman was staring intently at her fingernails. 

It was a codex, probably older than anything else at the faire and definitely the oldest thing Asta had ever seen, leather-bound and stitched together with a messy hand. The pages were uneven, and each sheaf seemed like it had been tacked in out of necessity after the book’s original creation. It was scrawled in a messy hand, unreadable even if Asta had understood the language it was written in. She found she did not want to part with it. 

“Excuse me? What language is this?” Asta asked, approaching the woman tentatively. She gave it a cursory look before smiling thinly back at Asta. 

“My dear, this is Deep Speech,” she said. “You’ve quite an eye for the peculiar. Even I do not know what’s contained within that. I only just procured it from a band of adventurers to the west a month or so back.” 

Asta frowned. “How much?” 

“Ten gold.” 

Asta didn’t have ten gold. She might have enough in copper and silver if she scraped all her savings together, but she hadn’t brought her life’s savings to the fair. “Could you hold this for me?” she asked, tentatively, eyes pleading. She could not part with this. It felt somehow too important, like something vital. 

“Of course.” 

And so Asta spent the better part of a few hours scraping through her room and then the rest of the house. When she came up just over two gold short, she turned to Kas, who narrowed his eyes at the request but complied. She promised to pay him back, and took off back down the street to the woman’s tent. 

When she returned home that night, with the book in her hands, Kas looked at her in confusion. 

“That’s what you needed the gold for? _Sidera_ , can you even read it?” he said. The pet name gave her pause - it had been what her family had called her as a child, and she hadn’t heard it since their parents’ deaths. 

“I will learn,” she said. 

So she learned. She spent two years scraping together what she could from her mother’s old books, picking the sentences apart and deciphering them. She didn’t leave her room, ate only what Kas forced her to, slept as little as she could to keep herself going. Slowly but surely, she unraveled the mystery of the ancient tome, and discovered it to be a journal. Its author, the mysterious Narai, spoke of an ancient deity, whose power over fate and the world order was unrivalled by the other gods. She was the expanse of the starry sky, the reason the planet turned as it did, the mother of all creation and the author of all destruction. 

Then, one day, she was ambushed. A cohort of jealous traitor gods had allied with the wrathful teammates of a fallen ally whose death was a part of her master plan for the world, and, together, they dispatched the Fateweaver. Stripped of an enormous amount of her power, and replaced by a group of lesser gods who were each given a part of her domain, Nal the Fateweaver was trapped in the dark between the stars, a place where no light can reach and where she only can write fate in potentia, where she has no power over her creations but to watch as they buck her carefully laid plans. The Fateweaver, unravelling here in the loneliness of the dark, resolved to take her realm back from the betrayers. She began to reach out to those wayward magic-seekers who still knew of her and worshipped her, granting them power and status in exchange for their service to her ends. 

Her prophecies, detailed towards the end of the tome, grow more and more incomprehensible and impossible as the spiralling Deep Speech goes on, long babbling chants about the monsters below the surface, the stars returning to her belly, the loves dashed and the flowers moved by her power, her touch. 

Asta fell into a deep slumber after the last words crossed her mind. There, slumped over her desk, a figure visited her in a dream. Nal’s true form is unimaginable to the mortal mind, and the figure that visits Asta is but a messenger, clad in golden starlight, skin like the cosmos, head one single, giant eye, unblinking as their voice radiated in her mind. They were standing in a pool, ankle-deep in cool, moonlit water, under a blanket of stars. There was nothing for miles around the, 

_Asta Lenore_ , they said, voice rumbling through her mind without ever touching her ears, _you are chosen of my Lady. She grows weaker each time she chooses a champion. Your service to her cause will be the last she can sustain for nearly three centuries. Do you accept this charge?_

The figure raised its hand, and in its palm appeared a bright purple crystal point, strung on a golden chain. Within its depths Asta thought she could see stars, the swirling cosmos, laid there before her, all clustered around a single, impossible, unblinking eye. She reached out a hand, and the figure dropped the crystal in her palm. It seemed to pulse with energy. 

_A token of favor from our Lady. May you serve her well._

Asta woke with a start, nearly slipping from her desk chair. The journal lay before her, as it always had been - although, if she squinted, its letters seemed almost to glow. She could feel warmth against her chest, the gentle thrumming of a power she could not hope to understand. Her fingers reached to her neck and clasped themselves around the crystal point, and its light leaked through and around them. 

She scrawled a letter for her brother, hastily, unable to waste any more time not pursuing the light that called her from beyond the stars. 

 

_Kas,_

_I’m sorry. I know how much it hurt you when A. left, but I cannot stay here any longer. I have been granted a purpose. My Lady the Fateweaver calls me to her service, and I cannot refuse her. I love you dearly, and I will write whenever I can. Please be safe. I cannot stand to lose you too. You are all I have.  
Don’t blame yourself. I am not angsting, or being melodramatic, and I haven’t joined a cult. I just want to see the world, to find my purpose, to help my Lady achieve hers. It is a good cause, I promise you. I am smarter than to make just any old deal. Keep me in your thoughts, as you are always in mind. I’ll miss you, brother. _

_With all the love in the world,  
Asta_

 

Asta slipped the note under her brother’s workshop door, knowing he had more than likely fallen asleep on his workbench as well. Then, she returned to her room, shoved a change of clothes and some personal items and coin into her rucksack, and, in the early hours of the morning, she left her childhood home. 

She did not look back.


End file.
